Team member!!

Name UNI
Yimin Chen yc4195
Jiong Ma jm5509
Feng Yan fy2297
Wenjing Yang wy2369
Yang Yi yy3307

Tentative Title: Central Park Squirrel Data Analysis

Motivation

  • Squirrels are everywhere, but is there a trend of where they prefer to stay with respect to their color, age, activities and all other features? Doing an analysis using squirrel census data may answer the question. Based on the results of the investigation we can compile relevant charts and make reasonable exploits, prevention or prediction based on information about squirrel habitat and activity patterns in Central Park.

Intended final products

  • A written report summarizing results of investigations

  • A webpage containing motivation, introduction, questions and analyses, visualizations with interpretations and explanations (tables, graphs, interactive map, etc.), discussion, conclusions and next steps, limitations, and references.

  • Reasonable usage scenarios for the website can be provided, for instance: Sometimes we might want to have a picnic or an event in Central Park but don’t want to be disturbed by a ton of squirrels. Based on our results, a location with less squirrels could be discovered as the venue. Researchers who want to collect data related to squirrel habits can accurately find the location of squirrels and related data through our results. Or he can directly extract and reference useful information about correlation of relationships between specific behaviors and age or color from our results.

  • A video introducing our webpage in details

Analyses, visualizations, and challenges

  • analyses: Find location distribution of squirrels in Central Park in 2018. Analyze the frequency for squirrel sightings by different fur colors. Investigate the relationship of behavior observation and age & fur of squirrels. ANOVA Test/ T-test- whether behavior are associated with age & fur of squirrels Construct data model to predict the behavior/habitat of a specific squirrel

  • visualizations: Interactive map: Relative habitat of the squirrels in Central Park that match the filter Scatter Plot (Smooth): Whether specific behaviors of squirrels generate (increase) trends according to age Plot: Does the combination of squirrel’s fur color produce a certain regularity of habitat or cluster effect?

  • coding challenges: some information needs to be further interpreted in the raw dataset. For example, in the column of “Above Ground Sighter Measurement”, some entries are ‘FALSE’ or blank. Also, in the column of “Hectare”, what different entries represent for and how do we visualize it?

Planned timeline

Date Task Due
Nov 3 Brainstorming NA
Nov 10 Finishing and submitting proposal Nov 13
Nov 15-18 Discuss about project validity Nov 18
Nov 19 Start coding! NA
Nov 25 Progress review meeting and troubleshooting Dec 10
Dec 1 Finishing coding part and starting website part Dec 10
Dec 3 Finishing building website Dec 10
Dec 6 Making screencast Dec 10
Dec 15 Presentation Dec 15